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It use to be that brand creation was governed by the product manufacturer. If a company had the marketing dollars and the marketing talent, a company could make about any product a successful brand. Think bottled water, cars, cell phones, and so on. Now with the advent of social media, digital-based products, and the internet, brand creation has become a shared endeavor between the product creator and the social community that consumes the product. The definition of the word “brand” changes. With the birth of social media and the internet, the word “brand” becomes more than “a trademark or distinctive name identifying a product or a manufacturer”. The brand becomes more of an experience and it has a social community that is centered around the particular product or service. Think iPhone, PlayStation III, and so on.

Brand Creation Between the Product and the Community

ServantOfChaos’ posting, Life at the Edge of Your Brand, describe this paradigm shift in brand creation as follows: “On the one hand there is the product of service that a business has spent time and effort creating. On the other is the population of consumers you are hoping will engage with your offering. And in the place where the two collide is the brand – but this is not your grandfather’s brand – it is the brand that is created in the flux and chaos of interaction between your offering and those who consume, use, engage, love or hate it”. Now, there are less and less opportunities for manufacturers and service providers to control their brand creation. Product owners can no longer control the users of their product using mass media. Now, more and more brands are being created by the user community where the manufacter’s intended marketing and branding plan does not survive “first contact” with the user community.

With internet media, brands are experienced, used, engaged, loved, and hated. On one side of brand creation, the Arc of Satisfaction, you have users that are using the product as it was intended. On the other side of the brand, you have the Arc of Experience where users come up with new ways to use the product or do a “mash-up” or re-mix of the product with other products. The social community now controls the brand. The product owner can at best collaborate with the user community to improve and transform the product.